virgil wrote:Oh, there are, but they're pretty limited in scope. A mental version of the Blood of Kali would make for some rather cheap yet potent hackers.
It won't. The only attribute hackers give even the smallest of fucks about is Intuition, for Initiative. Logic doesn't factor into hacking at all - it's always [Skill] (usually Hacking) + Program Rating.
Fortunately, 5e corrected this issue. Now its a unified Atrib + Skill [gear limit]. Programs don't have ratings anymore, instead giving bonuses or allowing effects.
OH I FORGOT! ITS FORBIDDEN TO PRAISE SHADOWRUN 5E MATRIX IN THESE PARTS!
MY BAD!
( gimme a fucking break )
The traditional playstyle is, above all else, the style of playing all games the same way, supported by the ambiguity and lack of procedure in the traditional game text. - Eero Tuovinen
silva wrote:OH I FORGOT! ITS FORBIDDEN TO PRAISE SHADOWRUN 5E MATRIX IN THESE PARTS!
MY BAD!
( gimme a fucking break )
Since when does a tumble weed mean "5E praise is verboten"? However, this thread is explicitly about 4E, so talking about 5E is certainly light on the relevance and arguably off-topic at.
Last edited by virgil on Thu Jun 25, 2015 11:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Come see Sprockets & Serials
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
I wonder if he's mad because people aren't paying him attention.
Also, I'm going to run a 4e game, involving the Matrix, but not using the Ends rules. I'm aware of most of the pitfalls of the system (script Kiddy, Hackastack, Agent Smith and Infinity Mirror) but what else do I need to look out for?
If your religion is worth killing for, please start with yourself.
The stay at home hacker "problem".
The hacker does his thing, everybody else goes for pizza "problem".
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
Stahlseele wrote:The stay at home hacker "problem".
The hacker does his thing, everybody else goes for pizza "problem".
Which was also solved by 5e AR/wireless hacking.
The traditional playstyle is, above all else, the style of playing all games the same way, supported by the ambiguity and lack of procedure in the traditional game text. - Eero Tuovinen
Distances low enough that you can reach your intended Target in a round or 2 of sprinting from cover to cover mostly.
Which also means they will be shooting at short distance at you.
So, high dodge. Then maybe a bit of Soak.
Primarly alpha damage on your hit i guess.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
The traditional playstyle is, above all else, the style of playing all games the same way, supported by the ambiguity and lack of procedure in the traditional game text. - Eero Tuovinen
@Silent Wayfarer: Lots of rolls for simple tasks, especially for TMs.
You should also state clearly to the players what getting an administrator access means. Some GM consider that once you have it you can do pretty much what you want while others will consider that patrolling ICE can still check your access or that some special actions might trigger alarm or require additional passwords.
If you go for the first interpretation, be aware that a hacker/TM with a high enough exploit program with a high enough alarm-delaying options will pretty much be able to break into any system without any problem ever.
Silent Wayfarer wrote:Hmm. I forgot to mention I'm running on PBP, that should ease the "decker minigame" problem.
Tangent: what would you need to make melee competitive against people with guns?
If we're talking about rules tweaks, more than anything, knife fighters need to become more competitive in terms of action economy and opposed dice pool values. Right now, gun men with bayonets or a free hand can add their Dodge or Close Combat skills to their defense pool without spending an action for the privilege while melee goons need to spend a Complex Action to defend against return fire even if they're in the process of stabbing said shooter. That's pretty rough, especially when you realize that melee guys already have half the attack rate thanks to attacking via Complex Actions instead of Simple Actions and that gunmen can use wide bursts if their skills are otherwise insufficient for shooting you in the face. So at a minimum melee attacks need to be simple actions and shooting in melee needs to be opposed by your target's reaction+skill. Even then guns are still better, but at least they're less insultingly better at knife fight range.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Fri Jun 26, 2015 10:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
Virgil, Longes, even replying to silva with dismissive image macros is too much effort. Do not fucking talk to silva, because he is a liar, a troll, and a moron at the same time. And where he says things because he's lying, where he says things because he's stupid, and where he says things because he's trying to piss you off isn't knowable or important. He is all of those things, all the time.
I mean obviously 5th edition SR doesn't solve any of the problems of the 4th edition Matrix, because it is the 4th edition Matrix with extra fiddly bits that also don't work. It literally has all the failure points of the 4th edition Matrix, plus some extra ones.
Now, maybe silva is lying, saying that SR5 fixed the problem where other players sit on their hand while the Hackers roll dozens of rolls in a masturbatory session with the GM that the other players have no influence on as a simple and gross prevarication. That would be in-character for silva, because silva is a liar who shills for bad games, and SR5 is a bad game.
Maybe silva is retarded and incorrectly thinks that SR5 meaningfully addressed Script Kiddy issues. The fact that some programs went unrated might make a stupid person believe that. And silva is a very stupid person. So the fact that there's all those layers of complication with rated and unrated software in SR5 might make someone who had an IQ the same as his body temperature might be persuaded that the issue was fixed somehow.
And of course, the simple fact that this is specifically a Shadowrun 4 thread and that any and all suggestions that people should play SR5 instead are off topic by definition means that silva's latest multi-post temper tantrum could be nothing more than a deliberate flame bait to piss people off by shitting up the thread. Like if someone started filling the thread up with discussions of vacuum cleaners or something just to shit on the table.
All of these are perfectly plausible silva actions, but the important thing is that it doesn't matter which it is. silva won't learn if you show him why he's wrong, he won't stop lying after you've shown everyone else why he's wrong, and he certainly won't stop trolling just because everyone hates him.
The core issue is that while the core mechanic of SR4 is very good, everything about the way it handles the Matrix is shitting right into your mouth. The level of detail, of caring about individual files and devices in a world that posits thousands of those things in an interlocking mesh network on every fucking street is just way too fiddly. Even if you interacted quickly with each "thing," the simulation cares about way too many "things" to ever have a reasonable narrative resolve in a reasonable amount of time. That's the essence of Infinity Mirror, and you have to change the granularity of the system or it's always going to be an insurmountable problem.
But it's more than that, because it's not just on the world side, but on the hacker side as well. This whole thing of caring about what individual devices and programs are "doing" at any given moment on the matrix means that the player can and therefore should be more of a bot shepherd than an actor in and of themselves. And that's where Hackastacks, Script Kiddies, and Agent Smiths come into focus. And again, the only solution is to change the granularity of everything so that these sorts of things don't emergently appear.
Now, from a procedural end, the SR4 Matrix is way too fiddly. Doing multiple tests to get access then more tests to act while making still other tests to cover your tracks is just really a shit tonne of rolls. This is a simple table-time issue, where hacking needs to be faster than it is. It needs less granularity of action in addition to less granularity of actors.
And from an effects end, hacking is pretty much bullshit. You shut down devices one at a time, and it's hard to imagine a device that would be worth a combat action to take down when you could spend the same combat action to shoot the operator of that device in the face with a submachine gun. And of course the actual procedure is that you take actions to get access and then take actions to crash the device. So it's multiple actions to do a thing that wouldn't be worth the time if you could do it in one.
So really, what you want is to go back to the basic rules for stunting. Take an action to "Make a Logic + Hacking Roll" and then "do stuff." Give areas and teams security thresholds of 2-6 and give some rough guidelines for what kind of "stuff" you can do when you beat the threshold by various numbers. Electronic Warfare tests could set the security threshold of the team.
Basically, SR4's matrix system is fractally bad (yet SR5 manages to be even worse in every way, which is an achievement), and you're going to have to rewrite from scratch. Which means you're going to have to go to a very spare system that is similar to the minimalist rules for climbing fences or avoiding laser alarms. Fortunately, SR4 has a pretty tight and robust core mechanic, so just using it as a hammer and treating all matrix tasks as nails is not a bad thing to do.
But for goodness sake, do not fucking talk to silva.
Depends on what you want to do.
If i remember correctly, they create a domain aspected to it's user with BGC in the level of their Force.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
Ok, I'll clarify. How useful are the magical lodges in SR4? They are required (but can be rented) to train Magic skills, and they create [Rating] Mana Barrier. Anything else useful about them?
Do they not also generate a domain/BGC aspected towards the user?
That means you'd get a serious boosting of most any magical attempt you make in there. Also, it'll bolster magical defence quite a bit, as everybody else trying to cast in/into there will face the negative side of BGC.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
Stahlseele wrote:Do they not also generate a domain/BGC aspected towards the user?
That means you'd get a serious boosting of most any magical attempt you make in there. Also, it'll bolster magical defence quite a bit, as everybody else trying to cast in/into there will face the negative side of BGC.
I don't remember them doing this but if they did, it would be a pretty huge advantage.
If your religion is worth killing for, please start with yourself.
Mana Lodges do not create background counts. They have not done that in any edition and I have no idea what stahlseele is talking about and likely neither does he.
Anyway, Lodges are required for ritual spellcasting and some enchanting. And since 99% of player characters care about neither of those things in SR4, it doesn't come up a lot. Mostly it's just that you need one whenever you want to raise your magic skills, initiate, or learn a new spell.
Street Magic wrote:CHRISTIANITY
Most Christian churches followed Rome’s lead, accepting magic to at least some degree and incorporating it into their doctrines and practices. The Catholics, though they accept the existence and practice of magic, declared that some practices such as conjuring touch on so many questions of faith and doctrine that church members may not practice them without permission. Some, like the Methodists and Unitarians, took a more liberal view, embracing magic and the good works it could enable. Only the most rigidly fundamentalist of Christian denominations (including more than a few evangelicals) completely resisted magic and all of its trappings.
EASTERN RELIGIONS
In most cases, the major Eastern religions (such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Shinto) embrace magic— since its existence only supports and reinforces beliefs that have existed for thousands of years, its reintegration into Asian society has been a relatively painless one. The flavor of magic practiced varies greatly by faith. For example, the priests of Shinto focus on summoning and communicating with spirits, while the Daoists of China seek knowledge that will aid them in their next lives through mysticism and alchemy. Even so, it’s rare to find an Eastern religion that does not accept, revere, and make use of the magical arts in one way or another.
Sooo, Christian religions that posit existence of god, miracles and angels had trouble accepting magic, but Eastern religions that posit existence of god(s), miracles and spirits saw magic as reinforcement of their beliefs?
Street Magic wrote:CHRISTIANITY
Most Christian churches followed Rome’s lead, accepting magic to at least some degree and incorporating it into their doctrines and practices. The Catholics, though they accept the existence and practice of magic, declared that some practices such as conjuring touch on so many questions of faith and doctrine that church members may not practice them without permission. Some, like the Methodists and Unitarians, took a more liberal view, embracing magic and the good works it could enable. Only the most rigidly fundamentalist of Christian denominations (including more than a few evangelicals) completely resisted magic and all of its trappings.
EASTERN RELIGIONS
In most cases, the major Eastern religions (such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Shinto) embrace magic— since its existence only supports and reinforces beliefs that have existed for thousands of years, its reintegration into Asian society has been a relatively painless one. The flavor of magic practiced varies greatly by faith. For example, the priests of Shinto focus on summoning and communicating with spirits, while the Daoists of China seek knowledge that will aid them in their next lives through mysticism and alchemy. Even so, it’s rare to find an Eastern religion that does not accept, revere, and make use of the magical arts in one way or another.
Sooo, Christian religions that posit existence of god, miracles and angels had trouble accepting magic, but Eastern religions that posit existence of god(s), miracles and spirits saw magic as reinforcement of their beliefs?
Probably a lack of research into the second half, however the idea that Abrahamic religions have difficulty with anyone but YHWH being able to do magical bullshit is far from new or inconsistent.
After all, the first response of Christianity to accusations of witchcraft was to execute the accuser for the heresy of believing that power could come outside of YHWH.
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Sun Jun 28, 2015 9:26 am, edited 1 time in total.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.
Omegonthesane wrote:Probably a lack of research into the second half, however the idea that Abrahamic religions have difficulty with anyone but YHWH being able to do magical bullshit is far from new or inconsistent.
After all, the first response of Christianity to accusations of witchcraft was to execute the accuser for the heresy of believing that power could come outside of YHWH.
And in the more relaxed version, all magic is either granted by the Christian God or the Devil. And all spirits serve one or the other.
It also needs to be noted that Shadowrun mataphysics is based on various non-Christian beliefs, eastern ones among them.
FrankTrollman wrote:Mana Lodges do not create background counts. They have not done that in any edition and I have no idea what stahlseele is talking about and likely neither does he.
Probably for the same reason I do...
Street Magic wrote:Domain Examples
... Rating 2: These domains are generated by the emotional impact of a great number of people or by a steady emotional, spiritual or magical influence over a long period of time. The sold-out concert of a legendary musician could qualify, as could a maximum security prison or enchanter’s workshop.
The rating one also gives the example of a bar for the Awakened.
Come see Sprockets & Serials
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
What's up with the Free Spirit chargen rules and is it possible to make something playable? I assume that step 1 is to take Possession and not Materialization.
Longes wrote:What's up with the Free Spirit chargen rules and is it possible to make something playable? I assume that step 1 is to take Possession and not Materialization.
They are written by the same creepy waste of oxygen that wrote the AI rules in the same book and the truly terribad SR5 matrix rules. Aaron is bad at things, and making new playable archetypes is a thing, so Aaron is bad at it.
There is no possible way to make the free spirit rules playable or even parseable without burning them to the ground and starting over from scratch. Aaron didn't even know that water elementals could levitate.
